"Theocratical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Messiah. Where is the axe that was to be laid at the root of the trees, or the fan that was to winnow out the chaff? Where is the fiery spirit which he had foretold? This gentle Healer is not the theocratic judge of his warning prophecies. He is tending and nurturing, rather than felling, the barren trees. A nimbus of merciful deeds, not of flashing 'wrath to come,' surrounds His head. So John began to wonder if, after all, he had been premature in his recognition. Perhaps this Jesus was but a ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... confront and deal with the only species of slavery which was then within the cognizance of public morals and practical politics. Doubtless our author, learned and erudite as he is, would like to transport us to those patriarchal ages when, under theocratic decrees, the chosen people were authorized to purchase (not to kidnap) slaves, and keep them as an everlasting inheritance in their posterity. The slaves so purchased, we know, became members of the families to which their lot was attached, and were hedged ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... and ambition, and avarice did not intrude into these visions of a reign of the saints on earth, but unquestionably notions like these exerted a strong influence. They established their commonwealth upon their theocratic model, and commenced ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... trial of king Charles I, it must of consequence be hereditary. Yet while I assert an hereditary, I by no means intend a jure divino, title to the throne. Such a title may be allowed to have subsisted under the theocratic establishments of the children of Israel in Palestine: but it never yet subsisted in any other country; save only so far as kingdoms, like other human fabrics, are subject to the general and ordinary dispensations ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... Euphrates into Ethiopia, and brought with them their sciences and their doctrines. Their principal College was at Meroe, and their Mysteries were celebrated in the Temple of Amun, renowned for his oracle. Ethiopia was then a powerful State, which preceded Egypt in civilization, and had a theocratic government. Above the King was the Priest, who could put him to death in the name of the Deity. Egypt was then composed of the Thebaid only. Middle Egypt and the Delta were a gulf of the Mediterranean. The Nile by degrees formed an immense marsh, which, afterward drained by the labor ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... not to understand my difficulties. His were of a different kind, the contrariety between theory and fact. He was a high Tory of the Cavalier stamp, and was disgusted with the Toryism of the opponents of the Reform Bill. He was smitten with the love of the Theocratic Church; he went abroad and was shocked by the degeneracy which he thought he saw ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... details of customs and prescriptions, the written as well as the oral, are man's work, and to be despised. But do not let us be afraid to recognise that the town is a divine institution. As a result, every government ought to be theocratic. One priest, famous for the part he took in the declaration of 1682, M. Bossuet, was not in error, when he wanted to form the rules of polity after the maxims of the Scriptures; and if he has pitiably failed in this endeavour, you have to accuse the weakness of his genius alone, which was ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... sacerdotal, all symbolic, more loaded in their ornamentation with lozenges and zigzags than with flowers, with flowers than with animals, with animals than with men; less the work of the architect than of the bishop; the first transformation of the art, bearing the deep impress of theocratic and military discipline, taking root in the Lower Empire, and ceasing with William the Conqueror. It is impossible to place our cathedral in that other family of lofty, aerial churches, rich in stained glass and sculpture; of pointed forms and daring ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... a theocratic government is a farce for both man or woman and, in the latter case, a pure mockery, as the Mormon woman has apparently a privilege which is denied to woman elsewhere, but this privilege is entirely out of her power to ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... even authorised by their presence those sanguinary spectacles, while the nobles and great personages in the kingdom thought themselves honoured when they were made alguiciles, or familiars of the holy office. Theocratic power preponderated, and intellectual movement became paralysed, ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... not suppose that there was complete liberty in those days. Such a state has not been reached even in the twentieth century. The early government of Virginia was largely aristocratic; that of Massachusetts, theocratic. Virginia persecuted the Puritans. The early settlers of Massachusetts drove out Roger Williams and hanged Quakers. New York persecuted those who did not join the Church of England. The central truth, however, is that these thirteen colonies ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... the contemplation of such abysses of mystery, my thoughts have reverted to this earth, in which pleasure sparkles but to evaporate. No solace in the investigation of those infinitudes, which are only fathomable by a system revolting to my judgment—the system of a theocratic philosophy; no consolation in the dreamings evoked by the lore of the stupendous skies: my heart throbs still for the detection and the possession of happiness. Nature has endowed me with senses—five delicate and susceptible instruments—for the realisation of bodily delight. Sights of unutterable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... people therefore should constantly be encouraged to face as practical and interesting facts, not as formulae, those reactions to eternal and this-world reality which used to be called our duty to God and our neighbour; and do concrete things proper to a real citizen of a really theocratic world. They must be made to realize that nothing is truly ours until we have expressed it in our deeds. Moreover, these deeds should not be easy. They should involve effort and self-sacrifice; and also some drudgery, which ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... 'given.' The truth as to the source of power made the guilt of Caiaphas or of the rulers the greater, inasmuch as they had neglected the duties to which they had been appointed, and by handing over Jesus on a charge which they themselves should have searched out, had been guilty of 'theocratic felony.' This sudden flash of bold rebuke, reminding Pilate of his dependence, and charging him with the lesser but yet real 'sin,' went deeper than any answer to his question would have done, and spurred him to more earnest effort, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... had thus become not a constitutional government fashioned after the best liberal thought in England of that day, but a narrow oligarchy in which the political order was determined according to a rigid interpretation of theology. This excessive theocratic concentration of power resulted in driving from the colony many of its ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... of the ecclesiastical polity and the majesty of the theocratic principle, it became necessary to ascend to the origin of the Christian Church, and to meet in a spirit worthy of a critical and comparatively enlightened age, the position of the descendants of that race who were the founders of Christianity. ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... succeed his father in due course, as his eldest surviving son. But this was not so. The law of primogeniture was not law for Israel. The invisible King expressly reserved to Himself the right of appointing the ruler of His people, as is evident from Deut. xvii. 14 and 15. The government was theocratic, not monarchical nor democratic. David himself had been chosen and anointed in preference to Jonathan, Saul's son, and Solomon, David's younger son, had already been designated as his successor through the prophet Nathan, partly because ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... they had been the real kings of Spain. The Gothic kings in their courts were little more than decorative figureheads that were raised or deposed according to the exigencies of the moment. The nation was a theocratic republic, and its true head ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... people of his perfect state we cannot say; his work breaks off before he comes to describe their condition. But we receive the impression that the government he conceived was strictly paternal, though perhaps less rigorous than the theocratic despotism which Campanella, under Plato's influence, set up in the City of the Sun. But even Campanella has this in common with More—and we may be sure that Bacon's conception would have agreed here—that there are no hard-and-fast lines between ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... the ministry. In a somewhat later period it was notably true of institutions like Yale and Princeton that their training seemed to fit many men for the law and for statecraft. We had, you see, passed from that theocratic phase of colonial New England life to the political constructive period of our ...
— The business career in its public relations • Albert Shaw
... Paris to the Government deputies for the Seine, M. Clemenceau declared himself in favour of 'the union of all Republicans'—upon what lines and to what end?—'To prepare the Grand Social Revolution and make war upon the theocratic spirit which seeks to reduce the human ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... represented by the rising in Thuringia, and especially in its intellectual head, Thomas Muenzer. Here we have the doctrine of "Divine justice" taking precedence of all else and assuming the form of a thoroughgoing theocratic scheme, to be realized by ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... The INDIVIDUAL has been so denied by democracy that he will abase himself to a complete effacement, as under the great theocratic despotisms. ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... to the most favored Americans, they remember what first caused clashing here was the presence and control of an unyielding Theocracy and an imperium in imperio, and they cannot fail to note that at the last conference of this theocratic organization the old assumptions were all renewed." They therefore deprecated immediate Statehood. The bill granting it passed Congress in 1894. The Republican, Democratic and Populist parties in Utah all favored ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... or of arrogant priests. Why Melville could withdraw unharmed was because a people stood behind him, a people suddenly wakened to a consciousness of its will, and stern in the belief that a divine duty lay on it to press that will on its king. Through all the theocratic talk of the Calvinist ministers we see a popular power that fronts the Crown. It is the Scotch people that rises into being under the guise of the Scotch Kirk. The men who led it were men with no official position or material power, ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... the confession before the High Priest. To the representative of the civil government He said, 'I am a king,' and then, as I remarked, He soared up into regions where no Roman official could rise to follow Him, and to the representative of the Theocratic government He said, 'Hereafter ye shall see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of God, and coming in the clouds of heaven.' These two truths, that He is the Son of God, who by His witness to the truth, that is, Himself, lays the foundations ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... theocratic, as among the ancient Hebrews; or church and state may share the dominion, or struggle between themselves for the supremacy, as in Europe in the Middle Ages; or the state may be theoretically supreme in authority and yet maintain and lend authority to a church. Even where church and state ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... not so well educated. As for lawyers, there was but little need of them, since disputes were mostly settled either by the ministers or the selectmen of the towns, who were the most able and respectable men of the community. What the theocratic Puritans desired the most was educated ministers and schoolmasters. In 1641 a school was established in Hartford, Connecticut, which was free to the poor. By 1642 every township in Massachusetts had a schoolmaster, and in 1665 every one embracing fifty families a common school. If the town had ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... known by Webster in his boyhood, among whom he lived, and whose lives passed into his character, were a part of the great migration which founded a new England between 1630 and 1640, and from a basis of English law and custom, modified by theocratic doctrines, and partially shaped by a struggle with the wilderness, built a state which was to be one of the great forces in American history. The agricultural life, which was more productive in the valley of ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... endeavour to avert the catastrophe by calling to his counsels Count Pellegrino Rossi, a man of unyielding will, who was as much opposed to demagogic as to theocratic government. Rossi, having been compromised when very young in Murat's enterprises, lived long abroad, and attained the highest offices under Louis Philippe, who sent him to Rome to arrange with the Pope the delicate question of the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, which he conducted ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... all those developments that have made life mournful. Cease, then, to seek in a vain philosophy the solution of the social problem that perplexes you. Announce the sublime and solacing doctrine of theocratic equality. Fear not, faint not, falter not. Obey the impulse of thine own spirit, and find a ready instrument ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... pecuniarily rich, even with the drawback of the towns of Lower Canada being rendered inland for half the year by means of ice. Lower Canada has been crippled by the policy of Cardinal Richelieu, who, by that policy, paradoxical as it may appear, was her first benefactor. A theocratic government, no doubt excellent for the taming of Indians, is not by any means well adapted for an intelligent people. So long as the trade of Canada was confined to furs the Jesuitical policy of Richelieu was advantageous, but now that the Indians are nearly ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... theocratic in its faith and philosophy,[176] it does not limit its conception of the Divine, much less insist upon any one name for "the Nameless One of a hundred names." Indeed, no feature of Masonry is more fascinating than its age-long quest ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... of Pope Rezzonico, the society of Rome had attained a pitch of elegance and a liberality of sentiment superior to that of any other city of Christendom. The theocratic nature of the government induced an exterior decorum in the public form of politeness, which, to strangers who took no interest in the abuses of the state, was so highly agreeable, that it tended even ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... in the colour of a Hebrew's feelings. The peoples with whom Israel comes in contact are either so many impious men made to be slain, or they are wicked tyrants, allowed by Heaven to chastise the chosen for some allotted period. This was the necessary outcome of the theocratic principle. How different from history as written by the Greek Thucydides! To that historian facts are so many facts, to be seen as they are, and to be told without undue enthusiasm, without obtrusive expression ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... dogmas like catholicity. Catholicity was an attempt to build a peace pact on ideals, and big ideas, and sympathies. Islam also tries to serve as a peace pact, but Moslem states have freely fought with each other. Islam does not contain an adequate philosophy. Its theories of society are theocratic and do not meet the actual facts and problems. If a union of two or more states is made, even for the purpose of aggregating more force for war, it will necessarily be a peace union when regarded from within. A confederation is the highest organization yet invented for the ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner |
